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Award Winning Improv Team Returns

If you’ve been to any speech event or improv event, you’ve heard of the improv team comprised of Ethan Vance, Isaac Zeimetz, Grace Larson, and Julie Start. This award-winning improv team is both famous and infamous throughout Pella High.

What exactly is improv? “Improvisation is a like a play with many different characters; however, there is an exception. This exception is that there are no lines, no roles, no rules, no themes, or anything else. The only thing that is given is usually a situation, but beyond this, it is completely up to the actors within the scene to develop everything,” said Zeimetz.

Vance, Larson, and Start created the team their freshman year, and Zeimetz joined during his junior year.

“We were all friends in middle school, and we all wanted to do improv in high school, so it just sort of happened!” said Start.

According to Larson, improv is definitely not as easy as it looks. Improv involves a lot of practice and hard work.

“Improv is something you get better at over time; you just don’t ‘get it.’ I mean sure you have to understand what makes a good improv, but with practice, you can become as good as the time you put in,” said Larson.

In addition to many performances at Pella High’s Improve show, the group also went to all-state their junior year, which is a huge accomplishment. They were the only performing group from Pella to make it to all-state.

“We had an amazing performance in which we somehow managed to blend multiple scenes into one improv all at the same time,” said Zeimetz.”It is very hard to do that.”

This may be their last year improvising together, but they’ll always have memories of their more unique performances.

“I remember a very specific improv about the lunch line at prison. It was a very strange scene because as the scene progressed all of us started laughing out of character. Towards the very end, all of us were on the ground dying as weird event after weird event occurred,” said Zeimetz.

“The tipping point, however, was when Grace Larson put me into a vat of stew. We just couldn’t keep going because we were all keeled over laughing.”